Jenna Bush Hager on how mom Laura always kept her cool: ‘I hope I turn into her’
"You know that old cliché of 'I've turned into my mom'?" Jenna Bush Hager asked Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, Dylan Dreyer and Sheinelle Jones at a Mother's Day event for the TODAY co-hosts.
"Sometimes I pray for that," Jenna said. "Because my mom was, and is, preternaturally calm. She never yelled at us — and we were god-awful. Everything that’s really true in me is from her."
The moms of the TODAY Show gathered to talk about all things parenting before Mother’s Day, in a special segment on May 10. TODAY.com was there and can exclusively share some of the conversation that didn’t make it on-air.
Jenna's mother is former first lady Laura Bush, who raised Jenna and her twin sister Barbara in the White House for eight years. Jenna, who is a mom herself now, is raising Mila, 11, Poppy, 8, and Hal, 4, with her husband Hal Hager.
It's especially impressive that Bush was so calm given that she was raising children at a time when there were fewer spaces for mothers to vent, especially for the mother of the First Family.
"I wasn’t always an easy person to put up with," Jenna said. "I’ll go ahead and say that, definitely as a teen. But I feel like in the ‘70s, ‘80s, it was harder to say 'I feel like I’m failing.'”
Laura Bush certainly didn't fail when it came to raising her daughters.
"Everything I really love, she allowed me to love, or taught it to me, or nurtured it in me: reading, writing, cats." Turning to the co-hosts surrounding her, Jenna said, "There’s no shame in that, y'all. There’s no shame. I’m a cat person because of my mom."
When the co-hosts began to muse about the way they were raised, Jenna said, "There was an article recently that said, 'Benign neglect is the best way to raise your kids. And here’s how to do it.' And I sent it to Henry, my husband. And I was like, 'See?'”
Henry's response: “Remember when you cried for your mom through the air conditioning vent and she pretended she couldn’t hear you?”
Jenna said she told him, “I’d probably pretend I couldn’t hear me either.”
With her oldest daughter, Mila, becoming a tween, Jenna is realizing that she needs to get comfortable with her kids showing her "benign neglect" as well.
For the first time this Halloween, Mila went trick or treating with her friends rather than her family, even though Jenna used everything she could to reel her back into the fold. ("But don't you want to take the cat?")
"I realized that I'm not going to be in all of my kids' memories. And that actually is a great thing," Jenna said. "They’re starting to become really independent, and they don’t need me as much. And I’m like, 'OK, I did something right.'"
With Laura Bush as a model, Jenna said she feels like she's on the right path.
Jenna added, "My dad always says he could never have been as successful without knowing (my mom) had us. And so I hope I turn into her for my little kids."
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
